Data repositories such as databases and directories are increasingly more prevalent as components of network management systems. The increase in use of databases and directories has diversified the configurations of such devices. With directories in particular, many protocols exist to enable access of stored information for use with network components.
Industry standards have been developed to standardize use of repositories such as directory and database components. One industry-sponsored standardized protocol is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), used for accessing data objects in directory devices of a network domain.
Even with standards such as LDAP, directories provided by different vendors and manufacturers are not entirely standard. For example, directory services use common protocols such as LDAP to access and retrieve data, but they may be configured to compile and maintain data using different syntax and data object relationships. This may be the case even though the data provided by different data repositories is intended to be used by the same applications. Because of the differences between even similar data repositories, applications that access multiple data repositories require a lot of user intervention to configure access to each data repository independently. As a result, accessing multiple data repositories can be a cumbersome task for the user of a data application. This problem becomes more pronounced when available data repositories for an application have different vendors and manufacturers.
To provide an example, it is difficult to use a directory-enabled application to access LDAP directories provided by different vendors. The different vendors often use different syntax and relational configurations amongst their data objects. The LDAP directories are different in the manner that data is identified and accessed for auxiliary classes of data objects. In addition, the LDAP directories may differ in the manner linked data objects are treated.
Because of these differences, users of directory-enabled applications typically have to reconfigure access to each LDAP directory using methodologies and programming implemented on the client. Alternatively, the user may sacrifice the quality of access available to the data repositories in order to conserve resources that would otherwise be needed to make non-generic inquiries to the data repositories. The result is that directory-enabled applications are more cumbersome and costly to operate in relation with multiple types of data repositories.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need in the field for a way to standardize access to data repositories such as directories and databases.
There is a specific need for a way to provide an intelligent interface that uses an application request to transparently retrieve data from data repositories that may have different configurations, content, format or that may use different protocols.